


Things To Do In Twizel When You're Dead

by SuedeScripture



Category: Actor RPF, Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-19
Updated: 2009-05-19
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:11:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuedeScripture/pseuds/SuedeScripture
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My inspirations are hopefully obvious. What's not quite mine, also obvious (and yes, I leave one major line bookish because I believe it was edited in post). Timeline probably fudged. Let's kick it old school and go back to NZ, shall we? Written for Monaboyd_Month on Livejournal.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Things To Do In Twizel When You're Dead

**Author's Note:**

> My inspirations are hopefully obvious. What's not quite mine, also obvious (and yes, I leave one major line bookish because I believe it was edited in post). Timeline probably fudged. Let's kick it old school and go back to NZ, shall we? Written for Monaboyd_Month on Livejournal.

“Merry! Merry!” cried Pippin. He ran into the shadow of the fallen Oliphant and heaved a great dead Orc from Merry’s prone form sprawled across the bloody war-churned ground.

Rolling him over, Pippin called out to him again, “Merry! It's me! It's Pippin!”

Merry slowly opened his eyes to the failing sunset and his greatest friend. “I knew you’d find me,” he murmured.

"Yes," Pippin smiled with joy.

Then he asked, “Are you going to bury me?”

“No, Merry,” Pippin whispered, “I’m going to look after you.”

He shook out the Elven cloak and spread it over Merry where he lay. Cradling his head, Pippin knelt over him to examine the cuts and bruises of battle. Pippin’s eyes, moss soft and weary, hovered close and safe above him as the thumb of his deerskin glove stroked tenderly across Merry’s cheek.

“And… cut!”

Billy slumped over with a tiny plaintive noise, pillowing his head on Dom’s armored chest while the crew came to life around the Oliphant’s corpse. Dom let out a snore.

“Easy for you to say,” Billy muttered without moving, “All you have to do is lie there while I run back and forth discovering your sorry remains.”

“It’s very hard work, dying of Black Nazgul Plague, or whatever it is,” Dom mumbled, reaching up to pet Billy’s messy Pippin curls where they tumbled over wool and leather.

“All right lads, that’ll probably be the end of it. We’ve lost the light as it is,” Pete finally called from behind the monitors.

“Oh thank god,” Billy moaned.

Dom gave a grunt that passed for agreement, and spread out further into the lumpy turf that had become his bane for the past six hours. “Got to go change.”

“They can peel my costume off me from here,” Billy muttered.

“I’ve had to pee for two hours,” Dom informed him, but still didn’t move.

“I have a blister on my left pinky toe. My real toe.”

“There’s a spiky bit of grass digging its way into my bum. Right at the crack.”

“Friendly.”

“Mmm. Almost unwelcome-like.”

Eventually, as the set dressers broke out the giant tarps to cover the enormous carcass for the night, they hauled themselves up and to their trailer, where with renewed liveliness, Dom hopped and wriggled until his cumbersome leather armor was off, and he made the pleasure of urinating loudly known to Billy and the costume girls and the greater part of the South Island through the flimsy door of the trailer toilet. He had the grace to wait until the girls had their backs turned before having a shameless scratch when he rejoined Billy.

“My curls are caught in my chainmail, Dom,” Billy whined immediately, looking fraught as indeed Pippin’s wig was stuck at the back of the neck, tangled in the links of PVC.

“Surely not your curls!”

“My curls!” Billy wailed dramatically.

Dom carefully plucked apart the bits of wig from mail while Billy whimpered "Like a little girl,” Dom cooed, scritching gently at Billy’s now freed nape. The laughing costume girls carried away the remainder of their costumes, leaving them to pad over to the makeup trailer in shorts and undershirts to be defooted, eared and wigged.

“I’ll go bald from back to front,” Billy lamented, as he sat having all the pins removed that held the wig on so firmly.

“You’re going bald from front to back,” Dom observed, his own hair sweaty and ridiculous as the wig came off. He stretched, groaned and sat back with his eyes closed, carefully avoiding any weight on the sore part of his bum.

“You look dead,” Billy commented matter-of-factly.

“I’ve been in a war, Bill. Avoided dragons and giant beasts on horseback. Slayed orcs. Stabbed an undead guy. It’s been a rigor mortis sort of week.”

“I slayed things. Slayed an orc, I did. A big, ugly one.”

Dom snorted while his ears were peeled off and the make-up remover was slathered over the glue, dirt and gore. “You had a wizard looking out for you.”

Billy sat back as his own ears and make-up were scrubbed off. “Could have left you there,” he grumbled.

“I would have stumbled in on my own, Plague and all. The wizard would have carried me home.”

“So now _you_ get the wizard.”

“’S in the book. If you read it, you’d know.”

“I did read it. I found you first. Before the wizard. ‘S in the book.”

Their back-and-forth devolved from speech into hearty moans and groans as their feet were peeled off, then lathered, exfoliated and lotioned. Dom was finished first (his foot girl was renown for her prowess in podiatric skill, and Dom often bragged about it to the others) and set about pulling on his jeans. This was more difficult than usual given how dead he felt, and he spent several minutes untangling the legs from each other before they would pull on.

Much commotion arose from Billy’s chair. The make-up girls were fussing around him. Dom’s foot girl was crouched in her typical position, but at _Billy’s_ feet.

Dom felt a light twang of possessiveness. She had, after all, been his and only his foot girl for the past year, and to crouch at the feet of another hobbit was considered a base treachery. “What are you doing with my foot girl?” he asked, accusingly.

“My pinky toe!” Billy arranged his features to a moue of tremendous suffering. Dom looked down at the toe with the rest. His fake foot, having come unglued with an air bubble just at the toe, had chafed over and over again as he’d run back and forth. It had raised a vicious set of blisters underneath and between the toes. The skin was red, raw and a bit flayed looking. A most grievous injury for a hobbit.

The set medic bustled in and rinsed the lather from the foot (Billy whimpered), advised no exfoliation nor lotion, though he trimmed away the dead skin (Billy gripped Dom’s hand tightly and didn’t watch), swabbed it liberally with antiseptic (Billy squeezed his eyes and mouth shut), wrapped it lightly with gauze and told Billy to keep his foot bare and dry and not to aggravate it overnight (Billy nodded with the valor of a wounded soldier).

“I’m crippled,” Billy looked up at Dom with liquid eyes once the medic left, his chin quivering.

“Clearly,” Dom nodded seriously, ignoring the snorts of laughter around them.

“I may never walk again.”

“Never.”

Billy looked apprehensive and pleading, “You… you will push my wheelchair, won’t you?”

“Till death do us part,” Dom pledged, putting his hand over his heart. “’Course, they’ll have to fix you a hobbit-like wheelchair. We'll have Alan Lee design it. They’ll build it of rowan wood, and carve it all over with gull’s wings, fit for the Guard of the Citadel.”

Billy grinned piteously, “You’ll have to build a ramp at Crickhollow. ‘Course, it helps that hobbits abhor stairs.”

Their audience of the chortling make-up and foot girls shuffled out of the trailer, comments of “The Billy-N-Dom Show, still going strong,” and “Like they were never apart,” floating back in their wake. Dom picked up his rucksack along with Billy's, a grin exchanged between them at the words.

Billy heaved himself from the chair and wriggled into his own jeans, less crippled than mildly lame. They left the trailer themselves, shutting the door behind them, Billy with one shoe on and carrying the other.

“Shite, but you were right about the spiky fecking grass,” Billy grumbled as he came down the steps, jerking his bare foot from the tufty ground.

“Wasn’t I?” Dom scooted over to offer Billy a shoulder, supporting him snugly and allowing him to limp over the turf one-footed. “I’m telling you, my arse may never be the same.”

Billy said nothing about the state of Dom’s arse, but continued to hobble to the car, where Dom bundled him into the passenger’s seat, and then settled himself behind the wheel, again, minding his seat most carefully.

“We ought to have a bloody driver,” he complained. “We’ve been in a great war and suffered lasting injuries, and yet they still expect us to drive ourselves home in the night.”

“I’ll have words with the King about how he treats his veterans,” Billy nodded sagely, “This is uncalled for.”

“Hands of a healer, my arse,” Dom shifted in his seat, and managed a wincing smile, “He’s off playing nursemaid to the royals, but ‘Hobbits are a most hardy folk’, he says.”

He started the engine, riffled through the available CDs and settled on the comfort of Abbey Road, and drove them the half hour back into the quiet sprawl of Twizel to the hotel.

Once inside, they stumbled blindly to their own rooms, on the same floor, but not side by side. Though it was not terribly late, Dom watched Billy close his door with little more than a “See you later,” tossed behind him. He sighed, yawned, and closed his own door behind him, a little sadly. Billy-N-Dom, back in full force, so they had said. But the day had been long, and they both felt about as dead as they looked.

It was tempting to collapse onto the bed as he was, but he was sticky with sweat and dirt, so he stripped off and climbed into the shower, washing off the remnants of the war-battered hobbit and becoming once again the exhausted, overworked and underappreciated actor.

He was barely out of the water when a pounding rattled his door. Slinging a towel round his waist, he pulled it open to find an irate Billy on the other side.

“There’s no beer in my fridge,” Billy informed him with a wide gesture to illustrate the grandeur of this offense. “No beer.”

“A travesty,” Dom remarked, pulling the door wide so Billy could limp in. Both feet were bare now, but he was otherwise how Dom had left him.

Billy sat on the foot of Dom’s bed, looking very put-upon. “They tell me they’re very sorry, but they’ve run out of bottles until their shipment arrives tomorrow, but I’m welcome to go down to the bar. They have excellent taps at the bar, Dom. _Down at the bar._ ”

“Of course,” Dom turned to his own small fridge, which was fully stocked. He pulled out two. “Did you inform them of your state of profound disability?”

Billy eyed the bottles like a fish out of water, and snatched the offered one readily when Dom held it out. He twisted off the cap and took a long desperate pull, downing half of it at once. When he was finished, he shrugged, looking sheepish. “No.”

Dom twisted the cap from his own bottle, enjoyed a sip, and turned to look out the window. The hotel sat on the edge of town, nothing but valley and mountains beyond, a canopy of stars above.

“Nice view,” said Billy from behind him, a hint of something in his voice that made Dom smile triumphantly. He cocked a towel-clad hip and replied, “Mmm-hm.”

He heard Billy limping over, his usual catlike silence fettered by even a small injury. Still, he squeaked and squirmed at the shocking press the frigid bottle at the small of his bare back.

Billy’s quiet rumbly laugh followed, leaving the cold bottle on the windowsill to free up cold hands, warming quickly on damp skin, circling round his waist. They were joined with the press of Billy’s chest to his back and his breath skating over bare water flecked shoulders. Dom didn’t move or speak, but felt his pulse begin to race and gooseflesh rise on his skin, even while his body whined with exhaustion.

“I might have lied about the beer,” Billy murmured in his ear, lips and nose brushing skin. "You smell good. Can't smell you through the phone."

"Can't do a lot of things through the phone." Dom tilted his head, offering his neck to Billy’s obliging mouth.

"Not for lack of trying."

Dom voiced the tiny thought that had been gnawing at him, “I thought maybe you'd had enough of me already today."

Billy turned Dom around so they could kiss properly for the first time in ages. They'd been together all day on set, and yet hadn't had a spare minute alone. In the midst of becoming reacquainted with each other’s lips and tongues and tastes, Dom felt Billy’s hand lift to cup his face, and felt his thumb gently mirror the path it had taken hours earlier across his cheek.

He grinned, happier and less lonely than he’d been in a long time, cuddling Billy close. “You did that on purpose. In the shot.”

“I was deeply in character,” Billy informed him primly, and then a note of seriousness stole into his words, “Pippin missed Merry that much.”

“It might make the final,” Dom said, “It was a good take.”

Billy’s mossy gaze didn’t waver, but eventually he shrugged a shoulder, “Who’s going to notice?”

Dom gave that an airy laugh. They were merely Merry and Pippin on this grand adventure, comic relief with sprinklings of innocent hobbity wisdom. Compared to rings and kings and enormous creatures and great battles, their part in the story was small. Anyway, not even half the Fellowship was quite aware of how attached Merry and Pip had become in the last year, and the absence of the last few months had made it that much stronger.

Billy sighed heavily, leaning against Dom and letting his hands slide downward, “If I weren’t dead and crippled, this would be a far more enthusiastic reunion.”

Dom hissed and tensed at Billy’s hands squeezing on his very sore bum. Billy narrowed his eyes in concern, and peeked under the towel to see the problem for himself. “Jesus, Dom, you said it was just a bit of spiky grass!”

“Yeah,” Dom groused. “Spiky grass that I’m obviously allergic to trying to get a leg over. Not the reunion I had in mind either.”

Billy made a sympathetic noise, and brought his hands up to safer territory and kissed him again. “I’m way too knackered anyway. Knackered and crippled and dead," he said mournfully.

“You smell dead,” Dom commented lightly. “A bit on the ripe side of dead.”

“I was hoping you could help me with that,” Billy grinned, “Being crippled and all, a man can’t wash by himself.”

“Oh, so it falls to me to do all the work. Typical Took,” Dom walked him backwards, carefully avoiding any toes, to the bathroom. "The Prince of Halflings can't lift a finger for himself. Or a toe."

“Well, I mean, I can’t shower without getting it wet, and I can’t get in the tub one footed. I might crack my head right open and die." Billy told him as Dom twisted on the taps to fill the bathtub. "For real. No Pippin. You’d have to bury me out on the war field.”

“Don’t worry, Pip,” Dom said cheekily, tugging off Billy’s shirt and pausing to stroke his face with a thumb, “I’m going to look after you.”  



End file.
